Manipulation of our media environment by foreign as well as domestic actors is now the new normal.
Photograph: Getty Images

At last, we’re getting somewhere. Two years after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, we’re finally beginning to understand the nature and extent of Russian interference in the democratic processes of two western democracies. The headlines are: the interference was much greater than what was belatedly discovered and/or admitted by the social media companies; it was more imaginative, ingenious and effective than we had previously supposed; and it’s still going on.

Last week the committee released both reports. They make for sobering reading. Although their focus was the impact of Russian interference in the US, the suspicion has to be that similar efforts have been – and are still – directed at social media in the UK and continental Europe.

The key figure is Russia’s Internet Research Agency (confusingly, for British readers, abbreviated to IRA), a formidable troll factory believed to be linked to the Kremlin, which has displayed mastery of postmodern disinformation techniques for fomenting polarisation, distrust and confusion in target populations of social media users.

The New Knowledge report studied 10.4m tweets, 1,100 YouTube videos, 116,000 Instagram posts, and 61,500 unique Facebook posts published from 2015 to the end of 2017. The IRA created social media accounts under fake names on every available platform – not just Facebook and Twitter, but also Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine and Google+. One of the most surprising revelations (at least to this reader) was the extent to which the IRA used Instagram to sow distrust and discord, which suggests that Russian trolls have a good working knowledge of western hipsterdom.

The range of tools, memes and targeting philosophies deployed by the propagandists is also deeply impressive. The Russians relentlessly targeted African Americans, for example. Of 81 Facebook pages the IRA created, 30 targeted African Americans, attracting 1.2 million followers. It created a dozen websites disguised as African American in origin, with names like blackmattersus.com, blacktivist.info, blacksoul.us and blacktolive.org. On YouTube, the Russians sought to exploit police shootings of unarmed black men via channels with names like “Don’t Shoot” and “BlackToLive”. And the most popular fake Instagram account was @blackstagram, with 303,663 followers.

The Oxford report found the same: IRA activities were designed to polarise the US public and interfere in elections by encouraging African-American voters to boycott elections or follow the wrong voting procedures in 2016, and more recently prompting Mexican-American and Hispanic voters to distrust US institutions; encouraging extreme rightwing voters to be more confrontational; and spreading sensationalist, conspiratorial and other types of junk political news and misinformation to voters across the political spectrum.

Other major findings were that “one clear Russian goal, pursued on multiple fronts, was to suppress Democratic turnout in 2016”, and that “all of the emphasis on Facebook has obscured the huge role of Instagram, as well as the Russian activity on many smaller platforms”.

As for the initial denial strategies adopted by the social media companies, Renée DiResta, one of the lead researchers, had this to say: “In official statements to Congress, tech executives have said that they found it beyond their capabilities to assess whether Russia created content intended to discourage anyone from voting. We have determined that Russia did create such content. It propagated lies about voting rules and processes, attempted to steer voters toward third-party candidates and created stories that advocated not voting.”

What does all this mean? Simply that the world has changed, and that democracies are into a new ballgame. Manipulation of our media environment by foreign as well as domestic actors is now the new normal. “If anything has changed since 2016,” writes one experienced reporter, “it’s that social media is no longer seen as just a useful tool for influencing elections. It’s the terrain on which our entire political culture rests, whose peaks and valleys shape our everyday discourse, and whose possibilities for exploitation are nearly endless. And until we either secure that ground or replace it entirely, we should expect many more attacks, each one in a slightly different form, and each leaving us with even more doubt that what we see online reflects reality, or something close to it.”

Or, to put it more succinctly: social media now poses an existential threat to the kind of liberal democracy we like to think we have.

What I’m reading

Cold turkey this year?How difficult is it to wean yourself off Facebook, Google, Amazon et al? Answer: not easy, at least according to one brave Motherboard writer who tried.

Get a second opinionDr Google is a liar, reports the New York Times – if you think “fake news” is bad for democracy, fake health news is really bad for you personally.

Poisoned penContrary to what the government might say, state surveillance has a chilling effect – not least on how writers suffer when they self-censor, according to Nik Williams at Open Democracy.